Malcolm Bradbury

"The door of a room adjoining opens a little; a dark, tousled-haired head, with a sad visage, peers through, looks at Howard for a little, and then retreats. The face has a vague familiarity; Howard recalls that this depressed-looking figure is a lecturer in the English department, a man who, 10 years earlier, had produced two tolerably well known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern.

"Since then there has been silence, as if, under the pressure of contemporary change, there was no more moral scruple and concern, no new substance to be spun. The man alone persists; he passes nervously through the campus, he teaches, sadly, he avoids strangers."

In these words Sir Malcolm Bradbury, who has died aged 68, made his own Hitchcockian, though uncharacteristically reclusive, appearance in The History Man (1975), his greatest and most influential novel. His death marks the close of half a century of academic and literary history, of which he was the chronicler.

Malcolm Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of Arthur Bradbury, a railway worker, and his wife Doris, and grew up in Nottingham. He took a first-class degree in English at the then fairly new University of Leicester, and did postgraduate work at Queen Mary College, London, at Manchester and in the United States, before taking up his first full-time appointment in 1959, in the adult education department at Hull University.

In 1961 he moved to the English department of Birmingham University, where he met another recently appointed lecturer, David Lodge, with whom he was to form a long and close friendship and amiable rivalry. In 1965 he joined the new University of East Anglia; he was to remain in Norwich for the rest of his life.

Bradbury was a prolific writer - as an academic critic, as a novelist and humorist, and for television, a medium that increasingly fascinated him. Bradbury, however, made no secret of the fact that fiction, and in particular the novel, was his true love. "Like most comic novelists, I take the novel extremely seriously," he said. "It is the best of all forms - open and personal, intelligent and inquiring. I value it for its scepticism, its irony and its play."

His first novel, Eating People Is Wrong, which picked up the baton from Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, appeared in 1959 and was an instant success. From then on his novels appeared at the rate of roughly one a decade. In almost all, the most frequently recurring theme is that of the slightly naive, liberal innocent, usually an academic, hilariously abroad in an unfamiliar and occasionally slightly threatening context.

Of all his novels, it was The History Man by which he will be most lastingly remembered, and which indeed was one of the outstanding novels of the 70s. It charts the successful career of the manipulative and promiscuous radical sociologist Howard Kirk at the University of Watermouth (which bears more than a passing resemblance to East Anglia).

Bradbury's contribution to the literary life of his time was as extraordinary as his prolific output. He will be properly remembered for his part, with Angus Wilson, in founding in 1970 the creative writing programme at East Anglia - at the time the only MA of standing in the subject in Britain, and today, in spite of many imitators, still the most distinguished.

His generosity to all literary ventures he regarded as worthy was remarkable, and his inability to reject appeals for help was a severe trial to his agent. To few, however, did Bradbury give as much time and attention as he did to the affairs of the British Council, of whose literary work he was an invaluable supporter. His tours overseas for the council, many of which reappeared transmogrified in his novels, were invariably marked by unscheduled revelry, as well as by serious literary discussions.

If he was pre-eminently a gregarious man, and generous with his friendship, Bradbury was even more markedly a devoted family man. In 1959 he married Elizabeth Salt, who was the greatest single source of happiness and support to him, and by whom he had two sons. He was appointed CBE in 1991, for services to literature, and was knighted in 2000.

The literary world is much the poorer for the loss of its own History Man, and of a voice unequalled for its humanity and wit.

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About this article

Malcolm Bradbury

This article appeared on p16 of the Guardian Weekly section of the Guardian
on Wednesday 6 December 2000.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 06.52 EST on Thursday 7 December 2000.
It was first published at 06.52 EST on Wednesday 6 December 2000.